Mountain Lion and Safari 5.2 are on their way, and 1Password is readier than it has ever been at this stage in an operating system upgrade.

It won’t be news to anyone that Apple has announced that the new next version of Mac OS X, called Mountain Lion, will be released in the summer of 2012 and that we developers have been given previews to play with. Developers are under a non-disclosure agreement, so I’m not allowed to say anything about Mountain Lion and Safari 5.2 that Apple hasn’t already made public. What I can tell you is that of all the times we’ve been given a first look at a new operating system version, we’ve never had a smoother ride.

Credit for this steady transition goes to our “new” way of dealing with browser integration that we developed last year. By working with the grain of browser updates and official extension support, updates barely cause a hiccough.

I should note that, since Mountain Lion is in beta until its scheduled release in summer 2012, there will almost definitely be differences between what was given to developers last week and what will be released to the public. Everything is subject to change. But the ease of this transition so far is absolutely unprecedented. We’ve only spotted one issue so far, a peculiar cosmetic turn of events. I’m sure that we will find other things that need to be fine tuned for Mountain Lion, but we are in a remarkably great position at the moment.

I certainly know what you mean about the necessity of 1Password. The official answer to your question is “we can’t officially support beta or preview software; soif something breaks we can’t promise to try to fix it.”

Unofficially, I’ll just say that we’ve seen zero problems with 1Password and Safari 5.2 on Lion.

We’ve been ahead of the game in complying with App Store sandboxing requirements. At the very worst, the handful of users with some unusual configurations may find themselves being prompted to help 1Password find and use their data in Dropbox.

The reason that we are in such a good position is that when we worked to make 1Password compatible with the Mac App Store, we wanted to do it “right”. Although we ask for a few “temporary-exceptions” in our entitlements, they are specific enough (with on exception) that we don’t anticipate difficulty continuing to get these accepted by Apple’s review process.

However, it is impossible to predict with any certainty how Apple will continue to review these, so we are developing some work-arounds.

We don’t want to say anything about iCloud support and integration until it is rock solid (or at least solid enough to offer to Beta users).

If you are a long time 1Password user you may remember a time when we violated this policy and pretty much promised WebDAV/MobileMe syncing. The promise was sincere, and we really thought we were 90% of the way there. It turned out that we ran into some insurmountable performance and reliability problems with MobileMe syncing. So given this history, we are doubling down on our policy of not promising anything until it is delivered.

See my reply to Nolan. Without making any promises about where and when, I can tell you that one reason that this is taking time is that it involves changes to our data format, which in turn needs to be coordinated among 1Password on all platforms.